Hornsby: 'I don't play it straight'

Piano great Bruce Hornsby came to music late, but it didn’t take long before he discovered his life was meant to be spent behind the keyboards.

“It was my junior year of high school, but I got deeply involved pretty quickly, and I realized I wanted to be a musician soon after that,” Hornsby said.

The singer-songwriter will make his Amarillo debut Friday in an 8 p.m. benefit concert for St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in the Globe-News Center for the Performing Arts, 500 S. Buchanan St.

Hornsby, whose most recent works include “Cluck Ol’ Hen” with bluegrass great Ricky Skaggs and a track on a Jackson Browne tribute album, said it only took one year of college to make him realize he was more suited for music school, “and then I was gone.”

“That was it,” he said. “I knew what I was going to do and I’ve been fortunate enough to do it exactly the way I wanted to do it all these years.”

After school, Hornsby wrote for 20th Century Fox and became a session musician in Los Angeles before forming Bruce Hornsby and the Range in 1984.

Later, Hornsby spent several years playing with The Grateful Dead, as well as collaborating with such artists as Don Henley (“The End of the Innocence”) and Bonnie Raitt (“I Can’t Make You Love Me”).

“I was a late bloomer,” he said. “I didn’t get signed til I was 30 years old, my first record came out when I was 31.

“It’s been quite a journey, from my time playing with the Dead, playing with all these other people’s records, Bonnie Raitt and Bob Dylan and on and on, and the time spent working with Spike Lee for the last 21 years.

“From Spike to Skaggs is a broad range,” he said.”For his Amarillo show, Hornsby said he’ll draw from his 28-year catalog, including breakout 1986 hit “The Way It Is,” “Mandolin Rain” and more.

“What people will hear is a deep involvement with the piano,” Hornsby said. “It’s an attempt at deep musicianship.

“I don’t play it straight,” he continued. “I’ll be very kind and play a good five of the well-known songs that I’m known for, and I hope you’ll recognize them.”

The Amarillo audience, he said, “is catching me at the best time, because I could never do, in my earlier, say, popular years, I could never come close to doing what I do now, not by a long shot.”

Hornsby’s music ranges from pop to jazz to bluegrass, but he said he doesn’t necessarily have a favorite genre.

“But I can say this: As I get older, I’m more of a folkie than a jazzer,” he said. “I was a jazzer earlier, and it still pops into my music ... now and then, but mostly, I’m more into the traditional, old-timey music.

“So there will be a lot of boogie playing here, blues playing, New Orleans style, old style, traditional roots piano style, but also with some spikey, modern elements on top.”